It seems like such a good idea, like such a kind and generous thing to do, to go to a different country to spend time in an ‘orphanage’ giving your time and love to underprivileged children. It is almost always done with the best intentions and from a real desire to make a difference, to improve these children’s lives.
When you arrive, it really looks like you were the person they were waiting for all this time. A swarm of children runs to you, surrounds you, tries to hug you, or sit on your lap. The second-hand clothes that you brought look better than what the children are wearing. The extra food and treats you buy are accepted as manna from heaven. And when you leave there are many tears, on both sides. As you leave, while you are sad to leave the children behind, you are comforted by the thought that you clearly did make a real, positive, difference in these children’s lives. Unfortunately, all is not what it seems.
First of all, the existence of the ‘orphanage’: as volunteering in orphanages became more popular, many countries found that the demand for orphanages to volunteer in far outstripped the supply. The solution was simple: open more ‘orphanages’. While you cannot just get more orphans, you can certainly persuade, coerce or threaten parents – especially very poor ones – into handing over their children to be raised in your ‘orphanage’. In many countries ‘child-finders’ or ‘child-recruiters’ go around poor, and often rural, areas to collect children. Either with a promise of a brighter future for the children or in exchange for forgiving serious debt, for example. The children are placed in ‘orphanages’, the ‘orphanages’ attract foreign volunteers and volunteers bring in money – only some of which tends to go towards the children.
This is the orphanage-industry, which essentially comes down to the trafficking of children for the entertainment of foreign volunteers to line the pockets of the people running the orphanage. Something that Australia acknowledge this year, by including mention of ‘orphanage trafficking’ in their Modern Slavery Bill.
Secondly, all the children swarming towards you: this is often seen as evidence that the children are open, kind, and loving. In fact, it is a sign of trouble. Children who grow up having their basic essential needs met, allowing for proper brain development, will not run up to a perfect stranger. In fact, from as young as eight or nine months old, children are supposed to be programmed to mistrust and fear strangers. This is part of their normal brain development and is a mechanism to keep them safe. Because you cannot know if a stranger is safe to be trusted. A child with normal brain development will watch the stranger from a distance and only start to cautiously approach her after time and interactions with trusted adults have indicated that it is safe to do so.
So why do the children in ‘orphanages’ almost invariably come running towards strangers? This is because their essential basic needs are not met. They do not get the attention, physical contact, stimulation and opportunities for attachment that are essential for proper brain development. These things in fact are so essential, that when the brain notices a serious lack, it will throw overboard important safety-mechanisms to try to secure what it needs. In this case, the very useful and necessary fear of strangers is thrown overboard in an attempt to get the attention, physical contact and stimulation that are so badly needed.
Thirdly, and then you leave… Surely, you are now thinking, if the children need these things so badly and do not get them from their caregivers, it is a good thing that volunteers are there to fill in the gap. This was long believed to be true, but unfortunately the gap is not filled that easily. Your temporary stay at the ‘orphanage’ may provide some of the things lacking, for a brief while. However, the greater impact on the children is the fact that you are only there for a short while – and even if you are there three, six or twelve months, this is still a short while – and then you go, leaving them behind again.
For the children this amounts to serial abandonment. Because before you there were others and others will follow after you. Every time a volunteer comes, they assure the children that they care about them, that they love them, and then they leave. Leading the children to draw the inescapable conclusion that they are not good enough, that they are not worthy of people sticking around. They already feel abandoned by their parents and more than likely think that this is because there is something wrong with them. And now they get dumped again and again by their ‘new best friends’. This impact is far greater than that of the smile you put on their faces when you were there. Because this fundamentally impacts their sense of self-worth.
If you want to really do something for vulnerable children, use your skills and qualifications to support community-based projects that allow more families to take care of their own children. Don’t be part of the moment that causes children to be taken away from their parents and then makes them feel worse about themselves on top of that.
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